Mar
06

Unitary: An Ajax based Units Converter Sidebar Widget for WordPress

Author: miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG | Posted in: Ajax, Programming, WordPress |
 

A brief intro…

This sidebar widget serves as a quick Units Conversion tool - i.e. perform conversions Unitary Screenshotbetween various units of length, area, volume, speed etc., while sitting smugly in the sidebar of widget enabled WordPress blogs. This widget came in rapid succession of curreX (the Currency Converter) and the idea came off a comment by David Bradley at the Weblog Tools Collection blog. Since I’m fairly new to WordPress widget development, I thought why not try my hands at this… and here I am with the first stable release of the same.

Just of a side-note, my venture into the whole PHP-JavaScript-AJAX scene is quite recent. Till now I’d limited myself to mainstream coding on .NET. I find this all new journey really enlightening and am pretty proud of myself at having been able to churn out perfectly working some cool-tools, starting entirely from scratch. Thanks to all those who’ve provided me with ample encouragement to take a steady step in this direction. Once again, as always, I am not perfect. I cannot stress on the fact how important your comments & feedback are in order for me to carry on further with such development work.

Current Version

  • 0.5

Features

  • Converts between hundreds of common & uncommon Units of Length, Area, Volume, Weight / Mass, Speed etc. More unit types to be announced in future.

  • Operates in Basic and Extended mode (which can be set from the Sidebar Widgets Control Panel of WordPress). The Basic mode limits the conversions to the more common & well-known units - thus making it more intuitive and user-friendly. However, the Extended mode makes available for conversions, a far wider array of units (including loads of lesser-known ones). This is meant for blogs which cater to a more scientifically advanced audience.

  • Precision (number of digits after Decimal Point) can be fixed for the converted results.

  • It employs an AJAX back-end, i.e. the conversions are performed without having to refresh the whole page, making the tool really lightweight & fast. Looks cool too.

Requirements

Download Unitary v0.5 (downloaded 719 times)

Installation

Installation couldn’t get any easier. Once downloaded, simply…

  1. Copy the extracted folder named curreX into your WordPress plug-ins folder.
  2. Activate the plug-in from the Plug-in Manager in WordPress.
  3. Visit the Sidebar Widgets page under Presentation menu to drag & drop the widget onto any sidebar you desire.

That’s it…

Showcase (the widget in action)

Subversion Repository

Change Log

  • Version 0.5 (2007-03-22)

    • Fixed an Internet Explorer specific bug that caused the units selection drop-down boxes to become blank (unfilled with any unit data) when a unit type was chosen from the first drop-down. The widget now works uniformly across both Internet Explorer & Firefox. All thanks to Náiron J. C. G for the IE-DOM+JavaScript based solution.

  • Version 0.4 (2007-03-15)

    • Fixed a minor bug that caused incorrect version reporting in WordPress plug-ins management panel.

  • Version 0.3 (2007-03-15)

    • Made minor adjustments in the layout of the plug-in resulting in smoother cross-browser rendering.
    • Renamed a bunch of plug-in related variables to avoid name collision with other plug-ins.

  • Version 0.2 (2007-03-14)

    • Included prototype.js with this distribution - as the plug-in wasn’t functioning properly on non-prototype based themes.
    • Fixed minor layout problems of fixed width form fields which was causing the layout to be distorted under different resolutions (read Sidebar width).

Please Note

I offer support for my plug-ins via the Chaos Laboratory Support Forum only. I will NOT respond to support queries left in the comment section below and, in most cases, will also not publish them. Of course, if you’d like to say something nice or helpful, then feel free to leave a comment!

43
Popular

Diggs
 
Suggested Reading:

92 Responses to “Unitary: An Ajax based Units Converter Sidebar Widget for WordPress”

Leave a Reply (Fields marked with a * are required.)